Vision is the portal of human perception that allows the most rapid transfer of information, and our brains support many sophisticated ways of processing visual input. Yet basic physical and biological constraints have required important compromises. Aspects and embodiments disclosed herein work around those compromises, and provide for fuller use to be made of the eye/brain portal.
Normal human color vision is trichromatic. In more detail, it is based upon taking three weighted samples of intensities across the visible spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. On the other hand, physics teaches us that the spectrum is continuous, and so that there is a continuum of possible intensities. Moreover, the physical spectrum extends beyond the visible, for example to infrared and ultraviolet; and also supports the property of polarization, to which humans are essentially insensitive. Thus there is a great deal of extra information in the signals arriving at our retina, to which we are insensitive. It could be of great value, in many applications, to make that information accessible. This remark applies both to natural scenes, and to images we can enrich physically, and also potentially to images intended to present abstract information (data visualization).